Umm. no. It takes many millions of dollars to run a successful election campaign to pay for air time, social media placement, old style advertisement, and (often borderline undue) influencing by promising major sponsors a return on their investment. This pretty much makes it impossible for sachpolitik driven intelligent individuals to participate in the process unless they subscribe to a major party platform. The result of this pre-screening is a population of politicians who are either well adjusted administrators blandly and visionlessly going where everyone has gone before (i.e. the current crew), or pathological narcissists spewing dumb polemics and having us all pay for what they promised their donors (i.e. the last crew). In both cases, the result is a grab bag of lowest common denominators.
A partial solution to this would be to replace the current system with a direct democracy and provide an advertising and candidature budget for each candidate, above which they are not allowed to spend. That would sort the plutocratic aspects of our system here.
To resolve the nepotistic aspects, you'd also have to remove gender segregated, private, and religion run schools, and then wait a generation.
The popular vote has many things to decide. Not that it makes for much better decisions mind you.
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